The Walking Dead Collector’s Edition includes a half-decade of comics

This morning Telltale Games finally revealed what its episodic Walking Dead video game series will look like when its disc-based iteration is sitting on store shelves. We’ve known that The Walking Dead would be receiving a full retail release since last month and as such the standard version of the game isn’t all that shocking, but this announcement is the first we’ve heard of the game’s Collector’s Edition variation.

Before we get to that though, let’s quickly cover the standard retail release. Come December 4, both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners will be able to walk into their favorite gaming retailer and pick up a copy of The Walking Dead. The disc comes packaged just as any other modern console game might be, and includes all five episodes of Season One of Telltale’s episodic game. Instead of the full $60 price tag you find on most video game releases however, The Walking Dead will only set you back $30, regardless of which platform you’re using.

That’s a very solid deal for the entirety of a game which has unexpectedly become one of our frontrunners for Game Of The Year honors, but if you’re a bit more devoted than the average Walking Dead fan and want to show your support of the people behind this game even further, you could spend an extra $40 to pick up the Collector’s Edition.

While not a very expansive package, the $70, GameStop-exclusive Walking Dead Collector’s Edition includes only one real bonus item, but it’s a big one: Those that pick up the Collector’s Edition of the Walking Dead retail release will receive a copy of The Walking Dead Compendium One with exclusive cover art by Walking Dead artist Charlie Adlard. That tome — it’s too physically massive to be simply called “a book” — contains the first 48 issues of Robert Kirkman’s original Walking Dead comic book series. That’s over 1,000 pages of incredibly dark yet engaging horror that covers the first five years of the book’s run. If you’ve enjoyed the game so far but haven’t read the comics, this should be a perfect opportunity to discover one of the best series of the past decade (especially as buying the Compendium by itself would set you back $60 anyway).

Obviously we feel that your prime motivation in buying either one of the retail versions of The Walking Dead should be the wildly positive critical response the game has received so far. As our reviews of Episodes 1, 2, 3 and 4 state, Telltale’s The Walking Dead is not just a brilliant adaptation of Kirkman’s bleak universe, it’s also a master class in how to tell a gripping, emotionally resonant story through the medium of video games. That should be the reason why you decide to drop $70 on the game’s Collector’s Edition bundle, but we won’t hold it against you if you do so specifically for that huge volume of award-winning comics. If we didn’t already own all those comics in their original form, we’d be pre-ordering this bundle right alongside you.